Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“The overall interview process went smoothly. My recruiter was friendly and communicative, and flexible with my schedule (I was traveling and had to split up my interviews). I received feedback relatively quickly after each round (within a few days - I often had to wait longer with other companies). No surprises, the recruiter clearly described the type of interview for each round.”
“Behavioral and Technical rounds were very friendly and relaxed. The last round was very intense and a technical deep dive into software engineering fundamentals like design patterns, code quality evaluation, etc.”
“The OA was more challenging than I expected, the questions were more aligned with Competitive programming style. Recruiter was really supportive and informative. Still waiting on the next steps, which is the final round.”
“Started with background discussion. Interviewer asked about a specific project i mentioned on the resume and dug into details. As for the coding challenge, I was given an existing package which contained an API for reading 4 bytes of data at a type from a file. To read 10 bytes, we had to call this underlying API 3 times to get 12 bytes, respond back with the requested 10 bytes, and keep the extra 2 bytes of data in memory for future calls. I solved this with a queue-based implementation, handling edge cases around reaching the end of the file. Got follow-up questions related to handling API call failures, retries, and streaming the output.”
“The process was straightforward, recruiter call followed by online assessment. Depending on the assessment, you are invited for a virtual on-site, with coding and system design. If you succeed, then there is a deep dive project round and finally behavioral. Interview is split into stages.”
“The interview process consisted of two technical rounds and lasted around 5.5 hours in total. The interview started with basic questions and gradually became more challenging. The interviewers focused heavily on problem-solving ability, C++ fundamentals, data structures, memory management, and operating system concepts. For coding questions, they often started with a straightforward version of a problem and then continuously modified constraints, expecting more optimized solutions. What went well was explaining my thought process, discussing trade-offs, and solving the initial versions of the problems. What didn't go well was some of the deeper follow-up discussions around low-level system concepts and advanced optimizations, where the interviewers kept pushing for further improvements.”
“It started well, but at some point I was rushing through, so I had to take sometime and relax. I needed to clearly articulate my thoughts process well. Definitely use the STAR method in your preparation, it really worked for me”
“During my Stripe interview process, I felt that most rounds went quite well from my perspective. I came out of the interviews believing I had performed strongly, communicated my experience clearly, and provided thoughtful answers across technical and behavioral discussions. What went well: The interviewers were generally professional and the process was structured. I felt confident in my responses and believed I demonstrated relevant experience effectively. The overall process was organized, and communication from recruiting was mostly clear. What didn’t go well: The feedback I later received felt somewhat misaligned with my own assessment. While I believed I had performed very well, the impression seemed to be that I was viewed as only “okay” across rounds. One frustrating aspect was that interviewers consistently ended sessions around 10 minutes early, which sometimes left me feeling I didn’t have the full opportunity to elaborate further, ask deeper questions, or fully showcase my strengths. This created some uncertainty, as the shortened discussions occasionally made it harder to gauge interviewer engagement or whether enough depth was reached. Overall, while the process itself was smooth and professional, the discrepancy between my perceived performance and the final feedback was disappointing. I believe more consistent use of allotted interview time could have improved the experience and allowed for a fuller evaluation.”
“Can choose between HackerRank and a local IDE for execution. The question is given in several parts; each part's completion is a must to proceed to the next part. There were three parts in total, to be solved within 45 minutes.”
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“The weirdest Anthropic round was the company values interview. It was almost like a therapy session, and honestly if you went to a therapist at some point, you will pass that round much more easily.”
“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
